This Is The Physics Student And Used Book Seller Who Allegedly Ran The 'Silk Road' Market For Drugs And Assassins

Ross William Ulbricht is extremely smart — let's get that
out of the way first.

It's not simply that he allegedly built and maintained Silk
Road — a secret Internet site on which criminals traded
drugs and assassinations — for years.

And it's not just that he built a fortune in Bitcoins for doing
so. The FBI alleges he earned $20,000 in Bitcoin commissions from
sales on Silk Road per day, and made $3.4 million in total. "By
far the largest balance held by any Silk Road user at the time,"
as
the FBI wrote in its indictment.

Before he allegedly built Silk Road, Ulbricht was an engineer,
studying solar cells as a grad student at Pennsylvania State
University.

I love learning and using theoretical constructs to better
understand the world around me. Naturally therefore, I studied
physics in college and worked as a research scientist for five
years. I published my findings in peer reviewed journals five
times over that period, first on organic solar cells and then on
EuO thin-film crystals. My goal during this period of my life was
simply to expand the frontier of human knowledge.

But he lost his interest in physics and chemicals sometime after
he graduated from Penn State in 2008, in favor of a new passion —
libertarianism. He wrote on his
LinkedIn profile:

Now, my goals have shifted. I want to use economic theory as a
means to abolish the use of coercion and aggression amongst
mankind. Just as slavery has been abolished most everywhere, I
believe violence, coercion and all forms of force by one person
over another can come to an end. The most widespread and systemic
use of force is amongst institutions and governments, so this is
my current point of effort. The best way to change a government
is to change the minds of the governed, however. To that end, I
am creating an economic simulation to give people a first-hand
experience of what it would be like to live in a world without
the systemic use of force.

He became a fan of the Austrian School of Economics, a
conservative take on the free market. The indictment against him
says he became a devotee of the Mises Institute, and that the
writing of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard "provid[ed] the
philosophical underpinnings for Silk Road."

Silk Road was, in many ways, the apotheosis of free market
economics. Because it was completely encrypted and completely
anonymous, using Bitcoin — an uncrackable "cryptocurrency" — it
stood outside any government regulation at all, including the
criminal law.

Ulbricht was born 28 years ago to Lyn and Kirk Ulbricht, who now
live in Costa Rica. They occasionally rent out
beach houses at Casa Bambu, a complex there. "All the houses
are solar-powered with artesian wells, beautiful tropical yards
and on a pristine beach," their web site says.

Ulbricht grew up and went to high school and middle school in the
Austin, Texas, area. In a long, rambling but deeply personal
video, Ulbricht describes his first few relationships with
girls.

Ulbricht's first love was from Dallas, Texas. The first time they
really hung out, Ulbricht said, they experimented with some sort
of psychedelic drug.

He also talks about how he became more guarded in love after his
first intense relationship, and how he now avoids "giving myself
over completely."

The real life of an
alleged mastermind

Although online he allegedly
was a criminal mastermind who ran the Internet's largest drug
empire, in real life he had all the usual mundane stuff going on.
Last year, he tried tosell a 2006 Ford
F-150 pickup.

He wrote a recommendation for his real estate broker, Akemi
Benton, ("She did a fantastic job ... In the end I learned a ton
about how to buy real estate and got a great deal on my first
house. Thanks Akemi!")

And he was the CEO of Good
Wagon Books, a non-profit that picks up used books and other
junk from your house and donates it to prison libraries and such.

That question takes on a whole new apparent meaning once you know
that he has been accused of facilitating the mass dealing of
drugs, forged IDs and murder-for-hire contracts worldwide.

The post is now attracting messages from sympathizers, people who
appreciated his contribution to online privacy and security
through cryptology (see image at right).

His profile describes him as "spunky, funky, not so chunky," and
features a dramatic, glowing sunset.

He also listed new interests on LinkedIn: "trading,"
"economics," "physics," "virtual worlds," "liberty." All of
those — bar physics — are at the core of Silk Road.

Enter "the Dread Pirate Roberts"

Ulbricht clearly had a goofy sense of humor. His alleged nom de
guerre on Silk Road was "Dread Pirate Roberts," a reference to
the character in the move "Princess Bride." The joke — from an
online privacy point of view — is that the Roberts character in
the movie isn't real. He was once a feared pirate, but retired,
and passed on the "feared" title to an underling, who passed it
on again and again, so that its real origin is completely
obscured.

That is a little bit how communications on Tor, the secure
network on which Silk Road sat, work — messages are routed
through multiple destinations making it nigh impossible to know
where they originate.

Stack Overflow

Ulbricht under surveillance

Doing that isn't simple, of course. And like a lot of coders,
Ulbricht once asked for help from the coding community. He turned
to Stack Overflow, the Q&A site for software developers.
Here's one of his questions, according to the indictment
against him:

How can I connect to a Tor hidden service using curl in php?

What Ulbricht didn't know is that by this time the FBI was
watching his every move, online and off, according to the
indictment. He also made the mistake of using his real name when
making the post, before changing it to "frosty."

The FBI began its probe of Silk Road around January 2011. By the
summer of 2013 they were conducting surveillance on Ulbricht
directly.

They located the Silk Road server, even though it was supposedly
secure, and copied it in its entirety — including all its user
accounts and millions in Bitcoin wallets.

The feds wanted to prove that Ulbricht was the operator of Silk
Road, no easy task given the encryption on Tor.

In June 2013, Ulbricht allegedly logged into Silk Road from an
Internet cafe in San Francisco. From there the feds traced his
Gmail logs and located his apartment 500 feet away, on Hickory
Street in San Francisco.

They monitored his mail. He allegedly received fake IDS there,
with different names on several forms of ID all bearing his
photo.

The contract killer

They also discovered that he was being blackmailed. A Silk Road
user named "FriendlyChemist" had hacked into the computer of
another Silk Road user and obtained what he alleged was a long
list of names and identities of Silk Road customers. If Ulbricht
didn't pay FriendlyChemist $500,000 the Silk Road customer list
would be exposed.

So Ulbricht turned to a hitman on Silk Road, and asked if
FriendlyChemist could be "executed":

FBI

The hitman, "redandwhite," offered a price:

FBI

Which Ulbricht allegedly accepted:

FBI

FBI agents visited him at the Hickory Road building on July 26,
2013, and discovered his roommates knew him not as "Ross" but
"Josh."

He declined to talk to them.

The endgame

By then, it was too late. Authorities conducted a series of raids
on Tor users, including an alleged seller of child porn, in early
August. A huge portion of the Tor network was "compromised" by
the feds — even though it was supposed to be uncrackable.

Today, the FBI unveiled its indictment and shut down Silk Road.
Ulbricht was arrested in San Francisco. He is being held in
custody pending a bail hearing. The indictment was filed in New
York, suggesting he will eventually be tried in Manhattan federal
district court.